Ohai, TSP! Yes, it’s about that time again. Once again, I am offering to humbly serve as your Prime Minister, if you will have me.

“The embodiment of the establishment”

I don’t want to bore you with all the details, but here’s a quick summary of what’s relevant: I’ve been Prime Minister for a total of 16 months, from June 2017 to June 2018 as well as from February 2019 to June 2019. For most of the other times in my tenure (since April 2016), I’ve either been in another Cabinet office or serving as Cabinet advisor; or, to put it differently, three quarters of my time in this great region so far, I’ve spent either directly in Cabinet or advising it. It’s fair to say that I know how to Cabinet and, most importantly, I know how to Prime Minister.

So, you may wonder, why am I running? I really don’t have much if anything left to prove at this point, and I’ve been more than happy to sit back, relax, and let newer generations of leaders take the reins and do great things. However, I do have quite a few things I can do to serve this wonderful region I call home in this odd little microcosm we call NationStates. The detailed reasons for my run will become apparent in the rest of the campaign, but to summarize: What I’m offering you is a fresh spin on a battle-hardened approach to leading the region, informed by literally years of work in the Cabinet, but now applied to new happenings in the region and new ideas to drive ever forward, with the ultimate goal of finding and raising new talent to take the reigns as Cabinet ministers and take our executive to new heights that I could never hope to achieve.

mā pango, mā whero ka oti te mahi 2.0

Yes, it’s the same campaign slogan as last time, but it still holds true! This beautiful little Maori proverb, which translated literally means “with black and with red the work is completed”, refers to the black and red colors used in a lot of Maori artwork, and expresses that many hands working together make any goal possible to achieve. There are many examples just within our own region of that proverb ringing true, ranging from SWAN and the new Community Standards that I mentioned last time, the omnibus alignment package we passed in the assembly last year, the Holiday Real Time episode that brought many people together to work on it, how our roleplay has been revived and become a bustling and buzzing trove of activity, and even on the more personal side how we all came together to give Heliseum a warm and heartfelt welcome back after his absence due to RL. There are many things to be done, and South Pacificans can do great things when we get together and do them!

To facilitate working together, a critically important part of leadership is recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of each individual (including oneself), and using that information to dispatch work accordingly or get help. For example, I’m very good at quickly reacting to developing situations, but I’m a hopeless case when it comes to cultural things; recognizing that, in the past I’ve often taken the point when a diplomatic situation arises (though always in coordination with and following the policies of the MoFA), but I’ve mostly left my hands off cultural things and let the MoRA and other people we’ve brought in deal with those issues. This principle of recognizing the unique value of each individual, rather than trying to squeeze everybody into the same mold, is pervasive throughout my leadership positions across NationStates and even IRL, and I hope to impart it with great insistence on my fellow Cabinet Ministers, and this coming term I intend to enshrine it into policy. Speaking of policies...

Cabinet policies - like insurance, but less boring

There are many things the Cabinet does that have become unwritten rules of how Cabinet operates; the precedent is usually followed, though sometimes erroneously because they are done from memory, and new Cabinet ministers tend to be confused the first time such things occur as they are simply not familiar with it. I plan to change that by taking advantage of the Cabinet’s Charter-granted power to issue directives and policies to regulate itself, and formalizing such processes. Future Cabinets will still be able to override those, of course, but even Cabinets that are stocked entirely with first-time Ministers (such as this past term, at least initially) will have documentation on-hand to guide and inform how they act in situations. While doing this, it’s also worth reviewing the standard practices we have had in the Cabinet and see if they even make sense this way, or if we have just been doing it that way because of precedent.

World Assembly

I have been a supporter of the creation of a World Assembly ministry for a variety of reasons. I have seen this become even more of an urgent point recently. Not only are our actions in the World Assembly more scrutinized than ever before, with our higher endorsement counts and our greater standing in the interregional world in general, we even had a smaller diplomatic incident over a recent vote in the World Assembly that, while not wholly unavoidable, could have been significantly assuaged had we been more prepared.

We don’t have a World Assembly ministry by law at the moment, but there is nothing stopping the Cabinet from establishing a dedicated department — and that’s exactly what I intend to do in my first week! We will issue a Cabinet policy establishing a new World Assembly department to inform our Delegate on how to vote on upcoming World Assembly proposals and issue recommendations to our citizens when appropriate. The department will also be tasked, as a second effort, to find South Pacificans to get engaged in both the General Assembly and Security Council chambers and put our name out there in those realms of NationStates as well.

Raising new Ministers

Last time I was Prime Minister, Nakari was Minister of Military Affairs, and we brought in Amerion as Cabinet intern. After my term, Nakari took over as Prime Minister and did a fantastic job; Amerion became Prime Minister later and while his term was cut short, he had everything going for him to be judged the same. I don’t want to take all the credit for their stellar performances (and it wouldn’t be deserved anyhow), but in both cases I saw their potential and pushed for them to rise up the ladder. You’ll see me doing the same thing again this time around, though with one difference: I will be even more forceful to find and employ great talents as ministry-specific interns, particularly in RA and FA, which had been regrettably lacking.

In an ideal scenario, I will become Prime Minister for one more term and then never run for Cabinet again, while starting from June forward, we never have an uncontested Cabinet election again. I can’t promise that, of course, but working toward this goal isn’t new to me and I will be continuing down that avenue. Great new leaders with great new ideas are out there, we just need to work toward getting them in place.

Transparency

As last time, I intend to fully utilize the Cabinet forum rather than our Cabinet Discord channel for communication, to better facilitate cogent Sunshine Act releases. I also intend to restart Cabinet Twitter once again, as I still feel that frequent short-form releases of that nature are the best way to keep South Pacificans informed of what the Cabinet is doing so that we in Cabinet can be kept accountable.

Furthermore, there are many places where we are not required to do Sunshine Act releases (for good reasons in some cases, maybe not in other cases). Much of the information still locked away could therefore at this point be released without any issue. In the coming term, I intend to have the Cabinet go through all these old vaults gathering dust and release what we can to South Pacificans. This term, as the appointed Minister of Military Affairs, I’ve already begun efforts to identify many threads from the SPSF forums that could, at this point, be freely released, and there are many more places where such releases could be made.

Conflicts of Interest

My home region is, and always has been, the South Pacific. If conflicted between the South Pacific and any place else, I will always choose TSP, no exception.

I do have some CoIs to declare. I am a citizen and current Speaker of the Assembly in Lazarus. I serve as Chief Justice in Mariner Trench, the companion region to the MT Army (though I have yet to actually hear a case). I don’t have any plans to attain political positions in either of these regions. Furthermore, I am once again in the Order of the Grey Wardens, as a Commander. For all of these, I see the potential for conflicts as extremely low.

Conclusion

I didn’t touch on everything in this campaign, but honestly, I don’t think I need to. I’m well known, what I stand for is well known, and I love answering questions (so ask them!). If you want to read more and don’t want to wait for my answers, most of what I wrote in my previous Prime Minister campaign still applies as-is.

I’m open to any and all questions, and I love answering them!

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How will the members (more specifically the minister) of your WA ministry will be decided? Will they be appointed or elected or what?

Concrete Slab
Coral Guard Member
5x Local Councillor 
TSP Legislator and Citizen
Ambassador to the League 
Author of GAR #471, #479, and SCR #271
Co-author of SCR #300
Founded 1/25/18

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How will the members (more specifically the minister) of your WA ministry will be decided? Will they be appointed or elected or what?

The specifics will be decided together with the other ministers during the transition period, but I think it's relatively safe to assume that there will be appointments at Cabinet-Advisor level.

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Just want to mention that I’ve also been thinking up WA department ideas, and should you be elected, I very much look forward to working with you and the rest of the Cabinet to create an effective WA structure uniting Delegate and Cabinet.

I guess my only question is... tarting tool when?

~ Aumeltopia ~

Raccoons are bandits! First they steal your food . . . and then your heart/identity!

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Why should a voter looking for change choose you?

Midwesterner. Political nerd. Chipotle enthusiast. 
Minister of Culture of the South Pacific // Former Prime Minister

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"Change" can mean a lot of things. What change are you looking for?

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"Change" can mean a lot of things. What change are you looking for?

You’re right, it does, so how about this:

1. Why should a voter looking for a newer voice in the Cabinet choose you?

2. Why should a voter looking for change in how TSP works choose you?

3. Why should a voter looking for change in TSP’s place in NS choose you?

Midwesterner. Political nerd. Chipotle enthusiast. 
Minister of Culture of the South Pacific // Former Prime Minister

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1. Why should a voter looking for a newer voice in the Cabinet choose you?

Most of what I've laid out in my campaign are things to help get a new generation of leadership up and running, by identifying new talent and giving them the tools to hit the ground running. We have 70ish Legislators with a lot of talent among them.

2. Why should a voter looking for change in how TSP works choose you?

That too depends on what sort of change, and if you have specific things you're looking for, I'd be happy to give my thoughts on those. But I do have a track record of being significantly involved in many efforts to refine TSP for the better:

• How SPSF operates as a whole and is consistently involved in operational decision making with multimilitary efforts
  
• Our judicial system, which we massively overhauled away from the old rigid and stifling model toward a much more fluid model
  
• How we go about selecting individuals for appointed positions; for example I wrote the extensive survey that we used to pick our current Chief Justice Kris and that survey in turn inspired the judicial survey in use to this day, most recently used to select Nat as Associate Justice.
  
• The new Community Standards
  
• Just in general, quite a few standard operating procedures that Cabinets have used in the past years
  
• ... and many more that I can't think of off the top of my head
  

3. Why should a voter looking for change in TSP’s place in NS choose you?

I think the trajectory TSP has taken in recent years is a good one, so if you disagree with that, then I may not be the candidate you're looking for. But my approval of this trajectory shouldn't be surprising, since I also was instrumental in making that happen.

In 2016/2017, it was TSP and TWP that spearheaded the push to reject Independentism as the de facto standard for gameplay-relevant regions that didn't want to align themselves to one side of the R/D spectrum, instead embracing a more sensible and nuanced approach. Particularly in 2017, I was a huge voice in the interregional world for that push, acting as the voice of TSP and its interests, and these days any classification system worth the bits and bytes it's stored on includes "unaligned"/"non-aligned" as a separate option from "Independent". I also made sure that we as a Cabinet would staunchly defend our beliefs in regional sovereignty, even if it hurt us in the short term, because it made us stronger in the long-term. For an example of that, just see the hit we took from Lazarus in 2017, but then how it was primarily me acting as TSP's Prime Minister in 2018 to bring 6 GCRs (in parts diametrically opposed) together to secure Lazarus after the Khanate was ousted.

TSP's place in NS these days is stronger than it has ever been in the past years for quite a few reasons, and I can reasonably take at least some credit for many of those reasons.

Once again, if you can detail what change in TSP's place in NS you're looking for, I can give you my thoughts on those.

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"Change" can mean a lot of things. What change are you looking for?

You’re right, it does, so how about this:

1. Why should a voter looking for a newer voice in the Cabinet choose you?

2. Why should a voter looking for change in how TSP works choose you?

3. Why should a voter looking for change in TSP’s place in NS choose you? 

4. Why should a a voter looking for change in the availability of a publicly accessible endotarting tool choose you?

~ Aumeltopia ~

Raccoons are bandits! First they steal your food . . . and then your heart/identity!

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I guess my only question is... tarting tool when?

4. Why should a a voter looking for change in the availability of a publicly accessible endotarting tool choose you?

March.

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